Heart Valve Center Patient Education | The Heart Hospital Baylor

What is Heart Valve Disease?

Heart valve disease occurs when the valves in the heart do not work properly. Your heart has four valves: aortic, mitral, tricuspid, and pulmonary. Each of these valves is responsible for blood flow through your heart into different chambers. Heart valve problems include:

Regurgitation: blood flowing back into a heart chamber when the valve doesn't close properly

Stenosis: narrowing, thickening, or stiffening of the valve that doesn't allow enough blood to flow through

Atresia: lack of an opening for the blood to flow through

Just as some people are born with heart valve problems (congenital) and some people develop them later in life, heart valve disease may have no symptoms in some people while in others it may progress until symptoms develop. Heart valve disease may lead to serious heart and blood vessel disorders if left untreated, including heart failure, stroke, blood clots, or sudden cardiac arrest.

Although medications may be used to treat the symptoms of heart valve disease, they cannot cure it. The most effective treatments are the repair or replacement of malfunctioning valves. Valves can be either man-made (mechanical) or biological, usually from pigs (porcine), cows (bovine), or horses (equine).

The highly trained cardiac surgeons and interventionalists on our medical staff offer a complete range of traditional surgical heart valve procedures as well as minimally invasive surgical and catheter-based management of aortic and
mitral valve disease. With comfort and care being a top priority, we try to take a minimally invasive approach to treating heart valve disorders first. This interventional approach means that one can often avoid a traditional surgical procedure. Interventional procedures usually result in less scarring, a shorter hospital stay, and a quicker recovery for most patients.

Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR), which uses catheters guided through your arteries via a small needle puncture through an artery in the groin to replace a diseased aortic valve. This procedure is recommended for patients who may be considered high risk or inoperable for undergoing traditional open heart surgery. The Heart Valve Center of Texas also offers clinical trials for those who are at intermediate risk for open heart surgery.

Transcatheter mitral valve repair with
MitraClip®, which is the insertion of a catheter through a small needle puncture through an artery in the groin to deliver a small clip that clips the leaflets of the leaking mitral valve together.

Robotic-assisted surgery for repair of a mitral valve that does not close properly.

Minimally invasive valve repair and replacement through small incisions called port access. This procedure avoids the traditional sternotomy, which is surgery through your breastbone.

Physicians are members of the medical staff at one of Baylor Health Care System's subsidiary, community or affiliated medical centers and are neither employees nor agents of those medical centers, The Heart Hospital Baylor Plano or Baylor Health Care System.